Day: September 1, 2017

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! The season of epic thunderstorms, community events, vacations for all. This plus my impending change to part-time has revealed stores of energy and ideas heretofore buried in the monotony of full time (which I really can’t do for long unless it’s my calling). I think my students have noticed too as some of the younger ones have started addressing me with the“-chan” honorific (which according to Wikipedia is used toward children, close friends, and youthful women!), and the older ones have asked me which of the high school boys I would date, which is weird and I refuse to answer, but I’ll take it. I can’t wait to see their faces when I tell them I’m 30 this month!

For my week vacation I drove to Hiroshima prefecture and city. I’ll call it a field trip since it was an educational and immersive experience and not enjoyable in the traditional sense. It happened to coincide with that missile-measuring between Trump and Kim Jong Un, so now I feel like knowing how to best survive a nuclear fallout is something I should maybe know a bit about. My most reasonable friend back home said I shouldn’t worry, but then a few days later I wake up to a message by this friend that said now I can start, because NK missile had just launched a missile over Japan. I don’t know how seriously to take all this. All I know is that being the only one to leave out of fear feels unconscionable.

Visiting Hiroshima was pretty surreal as there is no indication that it was ever a nuclear wasteland in many of the survivors’ lifetimes, other than the preserved A-bomb dome and the surrounding area which has been turned into a Peace Park Memorial. Besides that it’s just like any other modern (even moreso), thriving, green city in Japan. That’s on the surface anyhow. My friend from Hiroshima says that locals have a quite twisted sense of humour and an unusual fascination with death and violence. It made me think back to my kids in Korea who were also obsessed with death and violence and would joke about it constantly. I wonder if this is how the pain manifests generations later after a singular trauma like that, like a coping mechanism to address what is close to home without having to confront it directly. Or maybe I’m just projecting my preferred coping mechanism.

This friend happened to be in Hiroshima visiting his family at the same time. He’d come back home for Obon, which is the annual Buddhist tradition of welcoming back the spirits of deceased relatives. Japan makes a huge deal of their dearly departed. In addition to a wake and a funeral, there is a memorial service every 7 days after the death until the 49th, and one more on the 100th day. Then there is the communal anniversary during Obon on which there is a memorial service on the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th year after a family member dies. My friend had come back for the first Obon since his father’s death, which I didn’t know when he responded to me request to hang until we were at his father’s grave with his family and he was hugging his father’s gravestone (not traditional Japanese custom).

Later he asked me something I’ve tried to avoid thinking about, at least in this way:

“You know, you’re a superstar in Japan. How do you feel about that?”

Well, I am aware my presence is a novelty but I prefer to think of it more like with Western culture being as pervasive as it is while actual Westerners being so rare, that the sight of one is like seeing an animal in a zoo for the first time, but the cages are open and you are also an animal and… and eventually they’ll all mingle….and I’m bad at metaphors. It’s something you get used to is what I’m saying. But ever since he asked that I started thinking of it through this filter of reverse racism (can I call it that?). Am I being treated differently, even once the novelty has worn off, and cared for and about like an exotic and/or endangered animal? It made a bit paranoid. I started noticing things like how when I have an awkward language barrier-related encounter, it’s the Japanese person who apologizes profusely and seems so embarrassed, like I’m not the one in their country not speaking their language.

I’ve considered staying longer for what I am afraid now is the reason that’s life is easy (on the surface). If I do, maybe I have to accept that the way people treat me is not necessarily standard and that being here will always and forever be a privilege in that sense. Staying might only ever amount to a pale imitation of belonging, and a deep undetectable loneliness might be the sacrifice I’d have to make. Maybe not though. Maybe I just have to find my people, as is the case wherever I am.

Anyway, I came back to Sasayama in time for the yearly Dekansho festival. My students had been asking me months before if I was going like it was a big deal, and it was so much more impressive than what I had imagined, for anywhere let alone a town half the size of Nanaimo. There was song and dance, all of Japan’s most famous food (not a sushi in sight), games, fireworks, and what felt like the half the city in attendance. And it’s even famous in the region, with politicians from Osaka and Kyoto coming out for it. And it’s not really FOR anything. Actually no one really knows for sure how it started, but I have it on good authority (one of my students is the Mayor’s secretary) that it originated as a party on the beach by a small group of students from Sasayama who were studying philosophy at the University of Tokyo. The word itself – Dekansho – is said to be a portmanteau of three famous philosophers (Guess!). So there’s your relevant cherry on top of this month’s letter.

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

The reason organized religion merits outright hostility is that, unlike belief in Russell’s teapot, religion is powerful, influential, tax-exempt and systematically passed on to children too young to defend themselves. Children are not compelled to spend their formative years memorizing loony books about teapots. Government-subsidized schools don’t exclude children whose parents prefer the wrong shape of teapot. Teapot-believers don’t stone teapot-unbelievers, teapot-apostates, teapot-heretics and teapot-blasphemers to death. Mothers don’t warn their sons off marrying teapot-shiksas whose parents believe in three teapots rather than one. People who put the milk in first don’t kneecap those who put the tea in first.

Humanist Perspectives

Nietzsche

Fallacies

John Dominic Crossan

“Just because the Bible says “Jesus is the Lamb of God,” it doesn’t follow that Mary had a little lamb.”

Richard Dawkins: Unweaving the Rainbow

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats. scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumber the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Words to live by – Douwe Stuurman

what you will love mostis to walkon the earth

Story

Grow a Soul

“One of the attractions of the UU approach to religion and life is caught in the assertion that divinity and spirit are to be found not through blind faith but through finding and sending down roots to the deepest part of one’s unique self. As is true in botany, those roots spread out into the wider community and can nourish us and give us a healthy life. How do we know when we are living in the best place for those roots to grow? In so much as we do indeed “grow a soul” we should consider carefully the garden in which that soul grows.” - Bob Lane

Albert Camus

“For a generous psychology.

We help a person more by giving him a favorable image of himself than by constantly reminding him of his shortcomings. Each individual normally strives to resemble his best image. Can be applied to teaching, to history, to philosophy, to politics. We are for instance the result of twenty centuries of Christian imagery. For two thousand years man has been offered a humiliating image of himself. The result is obvious. Anyway, who can say what we should be if those twenty centuries had clung to the ancient ideal with its beautiful human face.” Albert Camus — Notebooks

Bertrand Russell

When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts.

The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple. I should say love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way. And if we are to live together and not die together, we should learn the kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.

Julius Caesar Lecture

Religion

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion. -Albert Einstein

Bible Lecture

Reading the Bible FREE

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On Existence

Dad?

Pindar

“O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life,

but exhaust the limits of the possible”.

Archives

Archives

Philosophy on Facebook

Samuel Beckett – words

“You must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
(Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, 1959, p.418)